Our Education Blog

On this blog, we usually write about people at universities. Today, we’re talking about ants … for science.

Allow me to clarify: the School of Ants project wants students, teachers or anybody to send in their ants (via Scientific American’s “60-Second Science“). All you need to do is contact them to get the collection kit (which includes 9 cookie-crumb-rich vials), then leave them out at your home, school, office, etc. Once collected, send your ants back to the NCSU Department of Biology. The collective USA results get posted on an interactive web-based map, allowing you to learn much more about the spread and diversity of ants than you ever thought possible.

What if you live outside of the USA? You may be in luck. According to the project’s website, “Insect specimens cannot be sent through international mail without proper permits,” but the team is coordinating with global ant experts to try to make it happen, and says to check back to the website for a future list of participating countries.

The next collection (and kit request period) begins on September 1st, so mark your calendar to get a piece of the action.

In a recent NPR “Planet Money” show on 3 main problems facing the country (July 29), hosts Adam Davidson and Alex Bloomberg cited an economist, James Heckman,who made clear that adult job training programs are not just inadequate today–they’ve always been inadequate. And the worse news, according to him, is that there’s nothing we can do (economically speaking) to fundamentally change the job skills disadvantage faced by today’s lesser-educated youths/young adults.

In fact, the only way to change the situation, Heckman argues, is to focus on tomorrow. What does that mean? The hosts cited landmark studies that show the only cost-effective way for low-income people to get these basic, integral job skills–communication, collaboration, problem-solving–is to go to preschool. That’s right, preschool. Sounds like a joke, but the studies are dead serious. In one (the Perry Preschool Project), the randomly selected control group that didn’t go to preschool fared much worse as adults than the randomly selected “treatment” group of preschool attendees, who got 2 hours a day of it. Here’s highlights of the damage:

As Heckman points out (via the hosts), these results indicate that the return-on-investment (ROI) of preschool is greater than any other form of education.

Other implications
Naturally, there’s a risk involved in making such conclusions: fatalism. If you didn’t get preschool before age 6, it’s too late, some might say. Good luck with your life, we’ll see you later (in jail). What can we do to help disadvantaged adults today? What should we do? Obviously, we’re not sending them to preschool, but maybe we need to tweak job-training programs so that they actually focus more on the most-needed people skills, or the “soft skills,” as Heckman referred to them. At the same time, let’s make sure raising the $14 billion one of the hosts says is the collective amount it takes to make preschool available to all underprivileged kids is a priority.

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the expression “high- tech” in the context of higher education? iPads? Blackboard? Notebook computers? Online classes? Course lectures on iTunes?

Job interviews aren’t what I’d call enjoyable, but they are unavoidable for most of us. They aren’t all bad of course; there are your pleasant interviews, which are more conversation than interrogation, and then there are the other ones.

Imagine an education social-networking website that is so engaging that its average user spends 2–3 hours a day on it. It’s a reality, and it’s called Piazza. Yes, piazza, as in public square. A fitting term: the Silicon Valley start-up, founded by an Indian immigrant (Pooja Nath), brings students and teachers together across more than 330 schools to a shared public space at no charge.

I recently found this cool word cloud tool at Wordle.com. You can enter a group or words or a website, and Wordle will arrange the most frequently used words in a word cloud. Larger words are used most often.

Before the Internet era, continuing education used to conjure images of adult-only classes, community colleges, and formal professional development seminars.

These days, continuing education can mean so much more: that you’re willing to learn on the job, off-the-job, and at whatever chance you get. And if you’re serious about your career prospects in a knowledge economy, you’d better recognize the advantage those chances give you.